ST Chewbacca / Peter Mayhew in Ep. VII

A lot of critics and movie goers said that about the OT when it was released first.

Do you think it was universally loved?

 

Peter's affable and modest and he'd rip my arms off (maybe) if I didn't give him this one.

 

but people have different opinons, maybe he thinks it's awesome but in reality it's total crap.

 

Hey, you leave my rose-tinted specs alone! I'm supergluing them to my face right now.

 

Yes. It is all a manner of taste, plus the actors haven't seen even the finished product.

 

Check the box office. Check the hue fandom that came out of nowhere. Check the sales of merchandise. Go to the archive of your libraries and check out the reviews. Not one film has ever been 100% universally loved but from all reports/books regarding the SW franchise each film garnered far more positive reviews that negative ones. Including ROTJ. If some of you are trying to cushion at the blows thrown at the PT by trying to rewrite history regarding the OT then, well, that's just sad.

Getting back to the initial topic/post that started all of this...the notion that ESB was being lambasted for heavy reliance on special effects is ludicrous. It was not only a breathtaking leap forward in terms of SFX but most importantly the special effects still took a backseat to the drama that unfolded on the screen. After all ESB was the most character driven of all the SW films. Were there people out there who didn’t like it as much as SW? Sure. I don’t think my local newspaper critic like it as much nor did my mom. Her reason was that she didn’t care for the cliffhanger angle and the darker tone in which our heroes did not prevail. If there is any criticism of the film I recall it would be those two. But too much indulgence in special effects and stuff like that? Nope. Don’t think I ever came across such critiques at the time.


And let’s get real here. Without the internet and social media it would have been pretty darn hard to get a much more true consensus. One couldn’t go online to different newspapers or check out Rotten Tomatoes to gauge what the overall feelings of critics were. One couldn’t visit a message board and see what hardcore fans and casual fans were saying. One couldn’t count all the positive twitter responses. That meant basically you were limited to what your local TV and newspaper critics said and what your family and friends thought. Me personally? My family (outside my mom), my friends, the kids on my block who exchanged bubble gum SW cards and the kids at school LOVED ESB. And as a kid myself I’m sure I may have missed some nuance criticism of the film uttered by adults, but I do recall going to comic book stores and comic book convention and eavesdropping on and at times interrupting conversations by adults and older kids regarding ESB and never did I hear anyone groan that the film was all special effects and no story. I used to read my oldest sister’s sci fi media magazines like Starlog in order to view the letters of fans (that’s how we got a sense of what other people around the nation/globe) were thinking. Not only did ESB get almost garner nearly uniform positive responses from those letter writers, the journalists and the editors of Starlog itself also thought highly of the movie and everyone absolutely enjoyed the film’s superior special effects. Sci fi fans were a little bit ahead of the curve in viewing ESB as a superior film to its predecessor. That’s my memory of all that went down. Perhaps I subconsciously blocked out any negative feedback such as any that argued that the film was lacking in substance and relying on bells and whistles. But I don’t think that was the case.

 

I meant to just take a pinch of salt, but the last person to use it never put the top on correctly.

Now it is all over the floor.

 

Found a video of the panel:

 

I think Mayhew's comment about very little CGI and mostly practical effects is a little overblown. C'mon, we all know there will be CGI everywhere. Everywhere.

 

Anyways who would take the word of a walking carpet?

 

As long as the practical and cgi effects looks good, it doesn't make a difference to me.

 

I agree and hopefully they are better than in the Hobbit films,atrocious CGI, except for Gollum and Smaug.

 

Which parts were bad?

 

1)The Trolls looked terrible
2)The whole scene in the Goblin Cave (except for the Gollum part)
3)The Barrel scene
4)...
and there are many other, I still enjoyed the movies but the CGI were distracting and looked to much like a "video game".

 

The escape from the goblins and the Goblin King himself was strangely sub-standard CGI, but the rest of the two movies were great VFX - the barrel scene was awesome

 

I did think the barrel scene was good but the CGI was not always good.

 

I agree. Peter Jackson used SO much CGI during the Hobbit filming, when it wasn't even needed.

 

have you seen the new Hobbit trailer, there are scenes in that trailer that look terrible.

 

Barrel scene was awesome.

 

Smaug also didn't looked as good in the first DOS trailer back in June last year, the sfx shots are not completed yet, I'm sure they will look better when the movie comes out.

 

I think it is a very interesting subject to look at in this respect.

Star Wars fans who loved the movies as kids and stuck with them watch the films many, many times over and so delved deeper and deeper into all aspects of the films and so consequently get more out of them. This is a relatively small group though compared to those who saw the films, enjoyed them and were caught up in it all from 77 to 83.

They moved on to the next new films that came out (BttF and so on) and as often happens when they got older they started looking at the "juvenile" OT movies a bit more cynically. Then some people started coming back in the 90's and when they did not too surprisingly the most "adult" of the films ESB became the favorite.

Some fans who stayed with them always tend to forget all of the charges that were made about the OT. I guess they weren't paying attention but the weird thing is that when the PT came along especially with TPM they then started making the exact same kinds of arguments against it that had been leveled at the OT some at the time and more after the case.

It's really perplexing when Lucas uses the tools that were created by ILM and pushed for by him in the prequels he gets slammed for "too much VFX" but when anyone else uses them it either usually doesn't come up at all or it just doesn't get the same traction.

It's still this weird left over from the transition from analog movie making to digital. It's like Dylan going from acoustic to electric. Here is Lucas the virtual godfather of "practical" analog movie making who pushed the boundaries of what could be done to the heights it could achieve in the OT but when he goes to "practical" digital movie making it's like he's betrayed everything he's created. The other people using it don't really matter but when he does it matters because it signals the death knell of "practical".

The OT was so perfect and so golden and so unassailable that how could anything Star Wars be done any other way? Seems to be the attitude. It's like if it can't be done the old way then it's not worth doing.

Never mind the reality that the practical aspect of the PT is many, many, many times that of the OT. Don't bother us with actual details.

 

For me the problem isn't that he pushed the technology but that he got too caught up with it that he used it where practical effects would have gotten him a better result (clonetroopers) and that he it was often used to create truly silly effects: Jar Jar stepping in poo, tongue lashing, Eopie farting, JarJar fight scene at the end of TPM, R2/3PO antics in AOTC, Anakin riding the Buttcow or Reek (which is smaller when Anakin sits on it than in other scenes). There were loads of cool CGI effects though: Podrace, Bongo-Ride, Destroyer droids, battle of Geonosis, Jedi Purge etc.

 

But they they were not a problem in the least.

First off he couldn't find any real clones and until it was revealed they weren't "real" how many people knew?

Total success.

Besides the ST's were bad.

 

While some critics and some fans may not have liked SW overall when it first appeared, the reality is that the vast majority of those who did see it loved it, championed it. Or at the very least really liked it. That is why it became a global phenomenon the likes of which had never been witnessed before. Now over the years has there been some leakage in the tires so to speak? Absolutely. There are going to be people whose tastes change, there will be people who wonder “how could I ever liked that”, and there will be those whose love of SW didn’t make the transition from childhood to adulthood. This happens with even the best of TV, movies, comic books, etc. Yet in the case of Star Wars these people are still in the minority. The films and franchise (the OT version at least) are still revered overall. Star Wars and ESB still make top film lists ranging from AFI to Empire Magazine. And the folks who still swear by it are not only those who saw it as kids and still think the world of it, but also those who saw it first as adults and still consider them to be some of the best films in Hollywood history. A few in this thread appear to suggest that there has been some reassessing of the quality of the OT over the years/decades. That hasn’t been the case. Rather those films are still looked upon by the masses as a standard bearer which is why, all these years later, people can claim a new hit film like “Guardians of the Galaxy” as the “Star Wars of today” or “the Star Wars of this generation.” Such comments don’t get floated UNLESS people still consider the OT as a great measuring tool for top quality popcorn filmmaking.

If anything has soured the general public and some of the diehard SW supporters on the franchise it is the PT. Now I will disclose I found the PT disappointing but I have nowhere near the hatred for it as some folks out here. But the truth is the PT did not generate the same critical acclaim, same merchandise explosion, same box office success (adjusting for inflation) and the same love affair with fans at the OT did. Like it or not that’s a fact. Perhaps the OT set too high a bar and some fans were unwilling to appreciate the PT in the same way. Or perhaps the PT was fortunate enough to be able to ride the coattails of the OT and generate big box office. Whatever the case you can’t compare the two. The OT started off being well received and loved by the general public and critics and remain so, for the most part, to this day. The PT started off just the opposite with critics at best thinking it was “okay” (nothing groundbreaking) and with fans incredibly divided over its quality and worthiness. Huge difference. Of course over time views of the PT can change for the better with the majority ending up looking at it as a great, masterful, successful trilogy. But when do we start seeing signs of that shift? Phantom Menace came out 15 years ago and the hate for it is still far too strong in some corners.

However getting back to what initially drew me into this argument, my argument is thar there is no evidence that one could provide to prove that ESB suffered from a backlash from people who thought it was too driven by SFX. None. Peter probably misspoke about this upcoming film being almost devoid of CGI but I don’t get how that statement could make someone so defensive of the PT that they would come up with such claims regarding how ESB was viewed by those of us who were around in 1980.

 

What bothers me are the double standards. Other filmmakers get excused...heck, praised to the skies...for their use of CGI and bluescreen, even if it's more extensive than Lucas's use of it (and that happens more often than we're supposed to think). There's a saying that you can always tell who the pioneers are by the arrows in their backs. Lucas took the crap, St. Peter "The Great" Jackson and other pet filmmakers got all the credit.

Even when it came to negative reviews of the "Hobbit" flicks, critics and fanboyz managed to blame everything on Lucas, because we all know St. Peter would never make a bad movie it wasn't somehow Lucas's fault -- want proof? Lucas created Jar Jar Binks! Take that!!

Allow me to explain that last remark: the "Jar Jar Strategy," as I call it, is considered so reliable that fanboyz think all they have to do is throw in a Jar Jar mention while dissing Lucas and that'll fill in all the blanks, making the most extreme leaps of logic plausible.

Of course, there were also the St. Peter worshippers who claimed, apparently with straight faces, that the "Hobbit" movies didn't use all that much CGI. And the same people who claimed that Lucas only made the prequels for the money (he funded the movies himself and funneled most of the profits back into his company) would not HEAR of the idea that St. Peter bloated up the tiny "Hobbit" book into a trilogy of lengthy movies for the (gasp!) money. No, he did it out of love for the story, or something.